Online advertising is a form of promotion that delivers marketing messages to users over the Internet to attract customers. Examples of online advertising include contextual ads on search engine results pages, banner ads, blogs, rich media ads, social network advertising, interstitial ads, online classified advertising, advertising networks and e-mail marketing, including e-mail spam. Many of these types of ads are delivered by an ad server.
Online advertising has grown recently with the advancement of mobile technologies such as smartphones and tablets. The catalyst that drives the popularity of smartphones and tablets is the downloadable network centric applications (also referred to as “apps”). Banner ads have become the most common form of conventional smartphone app advertisements. When these ads are clicked by a user, the banner ad itself has a hyperlink uniform resource locater (URL) to a website where the user can find more information on the advertisement promotion.
Banner advertisements are driven by a number of impressions, where an advertisement is displayed in a pictorial or text format on either a webpage or within a mobile app. Banner ad pricing models are mainly based on how many impressions an advertisement campaign will include, thus creating the advertisement terms CPM (Cost Per Mille) and CPT (Cost Per Thousand Impressions). With the use of banner ads, user interaction is typically known as a “click.” When a banner ad is clicked, the URL based promotion will invoke a web page in a separate web browser program to deliver additional information of what is being promoted by the banner ad. This may interrupt the progress of the application, by closing the application and/or opening the web browser. Many users may find this interruption annoying and intrusive.
Measurement of how well users respond to a banner ad campaign includes the ratio of a number of clicks to a number of impressions displayed either by an Internet browser or a mobile smartphone. Since digital advertisements are centered on Internet browser technology, tracking user clicks is typically provided by, or bounded to, browser-based cookies or specialized tracking code that has been embedded in a web page. This tracking method is severely limited in terms of the amount of data that can be collected as well as the types of data that are collected. Thus, evaluating the effectiveness of conventional on-line advertising campaigns can be difficult.